Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to vehicle passenger safety devices. More specifically, the present invention provides a reclining vehicle safety seat for absorbing impact forces resulting from a collision and comprising telescoping radial shields that project from the sides of a seat bottom, a backrest, and a headrest in order to create a protective cocoon around a vehicle occupant.
Many individuals use transportation, including cars, buses, trucks and airplanes in order to get from one place to another. However, these modes of transportation can pose dangerous risks and cause serious injuries to passengers upon collision and impact with another object. Passengers may be thrown from the vehicle or may suffer injuries to their person as a result of impact from airborne debris, such as broken glass and objects stored on the interior of the vehicle. Furthermore, rigid seats cause injury, such as immediate or delayed neck and back pain, upon collision due to the force of impact thrusted upon one's body. Therefore, there exists a need in the prior art for a safety seat that can recline and deploy protective shields in the event of a collision in order to protect the vehicle occupant from serious bodily injuries.
Devices have been disclosed in the prior art that relate to safety seats. These include devices that have been patented and published in patent application publications. These devices generally relate to a seat having a frame pivotally secured to a vehicle or portions of the seat are pivotally secured to one another so as to allow the entire seat or portions of the seat to tilt backwards, such as U.S. Pat. No. 8,297,698, U.S. Pat. No. 8,240,736, U.S. Pat. No. 5,636,424, U.S. Pat. No. 5,605,372, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,416,127. Other devices generally relate to an arm restraint net or shroud secured to an aircraft seat adapted to deploy and cover a pilot's arms upon ejection from the aircraft, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,415,366 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,215,835.
These prior art devices have several known drawbacks. The devices in the prior art fail to provide a vehicle safety seat that reclines immediately in advance of collision and protective side shields adapted to deploy from the seat bottom, backrest and headrest in order to protect a user from airborne debris. Some devices include chairs adapted to recline backwards upon collision, however, such chairs fail to comprise protective telescopic shields therein. Other devices include a seat having a restraint system disposed thereon and adapted to extend over a user's arms, however, the restraint system fails to deploy telescopic side shields configured to prevent debris from injuring a user positioned on the seat. Thus, the prior art devices fail to disclose a vehicle safety seat capable of reducing injury to a user upon collision via an automatically reclining seat that deploys protective shields from the lateral sides thereof.
In light of the devices disclosed in the prior art, it is submitted that the present invention substantially diverges in design elements from the prior art and consequently it is clear that there is a need in the art for an improvement to existing vehicle safety seats. In this regard the instant invention substantially fulfills these needs.